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How Did Sherlock Holmes Pave the Way for 50 Shades of Grey?
>> MIKE: Here’s an idea: Sherlock Holmes paved the way for Fifty Shades of Grey. theme Fifty Shades of Grey is a risque ebook cume novel penned by English mother of two E.L. James. It is the fastest selling paperback ever, breaking records held both by Harry Potter and The DaVinci Code. Oh, and also, it’s a fan fiction. A Twilight fan fiction. CLOTHED MAN: Jacob, keep your shirt on! >> JACOB: No. >> MIKE: Originally titled Master of the Universe, James crafted Fifty Shades using twilight characters Bella Swan and Edward Cullen. When she started gaining fifty shades of popularity though she began fearing fifty shades of lawsuits. She retooled her tome, apple F replaced all some names, and... safe. Now generally speaking fan fiction has a pretty bad rap. It’s considered amateur, poorly constructed, exciting only to dedicated fans. You know, like how most people think of Canada or Rob Schneider films. Which is why Fifty Shades of Grey’s extreme success is a little surprising, but maybe it shouldn’t be. Accepting attitudes about fan fiction aren’t common now, but way, way back, there was the anonymously written and published second volume to Don Quixote. There were professionally penned parodies of Alice in Wonderland. But the mother of all fan fiction honey pots has to be Sherlock Holmes. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off the beloved detective in 1891, his fans were miffed. Left with a treasure trove of characters, situations and settings, fans took matters into their own quill pen toting hands. The list of noncanon Sherlock auteurs is longer than Moriarty’s rap sheet. And their work is not only good, but it was well received. All this might lead you to ask, “Why would a writer not want to start with their own creation?” Well, in order to understand the fan fiction writer, you must become the fan fiction writer. snap era piano playing Sure, the laziness argument is really easy to make. But what if genuinely love Holmes and Watson as characters. And what if it’s not just you, what if it’s a whole community of excited people? snap Doyle could never explore all of the possibilities within the Sherlock universe by himself. It is huge. Something like: What would Detective Inspector LeStrade do if he ever came across a zombie Holmes? We give fan fiction a hard time for all of this borrowing and perverting, but this is actually just kind of how the arts work. If instead of characters or settings, we talk about artists borrowing perspective techniques, material choice or harmonic progression, suddenly we’re talking about art movements or schools of thought and not rip-offs or pastiches. Media scholar Henry Jenkins said that we are drawn to master what can be known about worlds which always expand beyond our grasp. This is a very different pleasure than we associate with the closure found in most classically constructed narratives. The Sherlock canon was one of the first to inspire a community of writers who were willing to attempt such a masterpiece. But fan fictions, whether Sherlock, Star Trek, Twilight, or the over fourteen million Star Wars novels, have traveled right under the major media radar. Until Fifty Shades of Grey. Which has sold twenty million copies in three months and was recently optioned by universal pictures. Stephenie Meyer, the author of Twilight, has even congratulated E.L. James on all of her success. J.K. Rowling has a similarly accepting attitude about Harry Potter fan fics. As do the creators of Adventure Time and Doctor Who. It stands to reason that while constructing their story worlds these people are keeping in mind characteristics and loose continuities which are welcoming to fan writers. And stigmas around fan fiction disappear, fan use of preexisiting characters and situations might reach a level of popularity that we haven’t seen in over a hundred years. Meaning that while Fifty Shades of Grey is the continuation of a fad Sherlock Holmes started, it may also be the beginning of a new heyday for fan fiction. What do you guys think? Will we start to see a ton more popular fan fiction? Let us know in the comments. And if you like us, you should talk incessantly about the show at the next party you’re at with your friends, except don’t do that because it’s irritating. No, but really, tell your friends. And subscribe. The relationship between Microsoft and arts benefaction is complicated. Let’s see what you guys had to say: reacocard calls Microsoft more of an arts enabler than a benefactor or a sponsor in the same way that people who make easels or paints are enablers and not benefactors, which is a fine distinction. Come on, tatgalnextdoor, it’s not that easy. But we will keep an eye out for you and your classmates if they identify themselves but we’re not going to pick a comment because you beg. That’s just cheating. Giffin Hotchkiss and Cressieee make the point that the real benefactor was Adafruit Industries who offered a ten thousand dollar bounty to the first the crack the Kinect driver and open source it, which, yeah, sounds a lot like direct and actual benefaction, so... That’s awesome research. That’s a little weird... It’s a little, it’s a- I mean, it’s flattering, but it’s also a little weird. OleprechaunO and Apolloscleric and a bunch of other people also make the point that they think the real benefactor is Hector Martin, the guy who open sourced the driver. I think our point was that Microsoft was the company that put all of the money into R and D and the development and the manufacturing of the Kinect, and so there’s actually a really interesting conversation to have here, it’s kind of complicated. kaykat0505 points out that artist aren’t the only people who are benefitting from the Kinect in that it is also being used in robotics and assisted technologies. It’s actually incredibly interesting, we’ll get some up here so you guys can see those videos. LeaPrufrock agrees with our assessment and says that Microsoft should continue to be considered a benefactor as long as they don’t actively stop people from making things with the Kinect. BigSkimmo had some feels while reading the comments this week and we do, too. From the bottom of our internet/YouTube hearts, thank you. theme Category:English Category:Complete